Obama is by no means the first president wary of giving a speech where every word will be compared to the most famous piece of oratory in American history. Many of his predecessors in the White House have balked at speaking in Gettysburg and had to be talked out of initial refusals. They understood that no matter what they would say, it would fall short of the spare words delivered by Lincoln, who needed only two minutes to dedicate a cemetery where less than five months earlier , soldiers had clashed.
That battle determined the outcome of the Civil War; Lincoln's address clarified the meaning of the war and redefined what it meant to be an American. But Obama, unlike his predecessors, stuck to his decision not to go to such an anniversary commemoration. His decision is doubly surprising because he has so often tied himself to his fellow Illinoisan Lincoln. Obama announced his candidacy in near Lincoln's law office in Springfield, Ill.
Both in and , he took the oath of office with his hand on Lincoln's Bible. And in , he replicated Lincoln's route from Philadelphia to Washington for the Inauguration. The schedule released by the White House showed the president at 10 a. Then, at , he welcomed to the White House a group of senators to brief them on the latest developments in Iran. That briefing was not scheduled until Monday, well after the White House declined the Gettysburg invitation.
Later in the day -- after he would have been back from the planned ceremony at Gettysburg -- he goes to the Four Seasons Hotel to address The Wall Street Journal CEO Council's annual meeting and talk about the economy.
There are differing counts of how many of the 28 presidents after Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg. CNN reports that 24 have gone. The Gettysburg Times reports that every 20th-century president made the pilgrimage except for Bill Clinton. Woodrow Wilson spoke at the 50th anniversary in Franklin D.
Roosevelt spoke at the 75th in Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson all took separate trips there in the th-anniversary year of But not all went willingly, and all tried to avoid speech comparisons with Lincoln.
In his new biography of Wilson, A. Scott Berg writes that the president declined the invitation to go to the 50th-anniversary ceremonies. He reconsidered only after a warning from a Pennsylvania congressman that there would be recriminations if he stayed away. He said that his absence would be resented. In short it would be more than a passing mistake; it would amount to a serious blunder.
When Wilson arrived there, he quickly saw he was right to reconsider. But Wilson, famed for his oratorical skills, delivered one of his flatter speeches. He spoke of reconciliation, never mentioning race or slavery, never suggesting which side was right. At the next big anniversary, the 75th in , there were fewer veterans alive when Roosevelt spoke. Like Wilson, Roosevelt did not speak of race or the reasons for the war. The goal was to recreate what Union and Confederate leaders saw —and what they could not see—in the days of the battle.
Two key elements in their effort were the National Elevation Dataset and an map of the battlefield. The elevation dataset, a project of the U.
The team then compared the current map with an historic, foot-by foot map printed in by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The old map helped the team remove features from the landscape that were not there in It also helped them distinguish the orchards, farms, hardwood forests, pine forests, wooden fences, stone walls, and buildings that were there at the time of the battle. The town had a population of 7, at the census, and the many surrounding farms were still bare or newly planted at the time of the image.
You can click here for a close-up of the modern national military park on the site. Our mapping reveals that Lee never had a clear view of enemy forces; the terrain itself hid portions of the Union Army throughout the battle. For instance, when Confederate General Robert E. He sent General William Longstreet to try to get around the southern flank of the Union Army, a move that failed. On the other hand, Union soldiers situated on the higher ridges to the east—the Round Tops, Cemetery Hill, and Culp's Hill—had a much better vantage point for viewing Confederate positions and movements.
These positions on the high ground, as well as the shielded movements behind those hills, allowed the Union Army to occupy better defensive positions and reinforce lines in the right places. This advantage helped win the battle and, in the long run, the war. Geological Survey.
Caption by Michael Carlowicz. Modern remote sensing tools are helping to shed new light on the historic battle. Here are some of the early returns. Sites relevant to the start of the American Revolutionary War are interspersed throughout the modern-day Boston metropolitan region.
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